


Born Under Punches

by orestesfasting



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 1970s, Angst with a Happy Ending, First War with Voldemort, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Marauders, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Mutual Pining, Post-Hogwarts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2019-08-12
Packaged: 2020-08-20 06:29:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20223337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orestesfasting/pseuds/orestesfasting
Summary: The truth is that he’s kept this love on the back burner of his heart for so many years that he’s grown accustomed to the smell and can sometimes almost ignore it completely. He likes to think he’s made peace with the fact that he’ll never know what it tastes like.





	Born Under Punches

Remus supposes it’s almost funny, in the way any gratuitous pile-on of fucked up nonsense is almost funny.

This morning he woke up in the Forest of Dean, the November moon having spit him out aching, delirious, and (for the first time since he was fifteen in the Shrieking Shack) alone. It took him an hour to stand up and another to wandlessly Summon his wand and clothes from the underbrush—probably miles away by then—where he’d stowed them the night before. By the time he finished puking and managed to Apparate back to his flat it was the middle of the afternoon, and the first thing to greet him was an eviction notice taped to his front door.

“Ha.” He actually says it out loud, though it comes out as more of a croak. The paper is a sneering yellow, the letters blocky and ostentatious. He supposes the thing to do is to rip it off the door and crumple it into a ball, or maybe rip it in half, then quarters and eighths and sixteenths and let the pieces flutter down into a pile on his doorstep, but the thought just makes him tired. He leaves it where it is and unlocks the door with a tap of his wand.

The anticipated click doesn’t come, though, and realising the door is already unlocked, Remus freezes. He tightens his grip on his wand and raises it, wondering how many more additions to the pile-on he can take in one 24-hour period, while with his left hand he turns the knob and pushes the door open—gently, he thought, but it’s so loose on its hinges it still swings all the way in and hits the inside wall with a dull giveaway smack.

James christened his flat “The Matchbox” when Remus moved in six months ago, and for a good reason: it boasts a single, 200 square-foot room (the loo is down the hall and shared among the whole floor) with a kitchenette in the corner (a two-burner stove, sink, and a foot of counter space) and a mattress on the floor. It means there’s not much snooping to be done to locate the intruder. Two steps forward and the tip of his wand would brush the back of Sirius’s head.

“Moony, do you really—and I mean _ really—_not have _ any _ sugar in this flat?” He slams the cupboard shut and spins around.

Remus hasn’t seen him in three weeks and the first thing he notices is that his hair has grown, the dark curling ends just brushing the collar of his leather jacket. A strand of it falls from where it was tucked behind his ear as he looks Remus quickly up and down, his accusatory glare morphing into a concerned frown. 

“You look like shit.”

“I don’t take sugar in my tea,” Remus replies.

“I know.”

They look at each other, and Remus tries to ignore the fact that he can acutely sense Sirius thinking, his slate-coloured eyes barely concealing the whirring behind them. Remus steps inside, shuts the door, and focuses his efforts on unclenching his jaw. The kettle on the stove begins to wail and Sirius silences it with a quick jab of his wand; Remus almost makes a mental note to buy sugar next time he goes to Tesco before remembering Sirius will probably never come to this flat again.

“So that notice on your door—”

“I don’t—I’d rather not talk about it, actually.”

Sirius blows a short puff of air out through his nostrils and purses his lips. “Right,” he says after a moment, nodding coolly, “you’re going to kip at mine for a while, then.”

Remus stares at him. Three weeks of radio silence, and now Sirius has come to his flat unannounced on the morning after the full moon to boss Remus around when he knows he’ll be at his worst. Though Remus can live with the indignity, it’s what Sirius pointedly doesn’t say that makes his hackles raise, even as the wolf sleepily retreats—namely, _ I told you so._ Six months ago Remus was living in a small but comfortable flat in Kentish Town with Lily; they’d been drinking tepid beer on the fire escape one night when she broke the news that she and James had decided to move in together. The following two weeks were a true test of Remus’s fortitude as Sirius all but pleaded with him to move into James’s old bedroom in their shared flat in Camden, the one he paid for with the inheritance from his uncle Alphard. You won’t have to pay rent, he’d say. I’d be a detriment to myself if I lived alone. Remus met him tit for tat: I’m not a charity case. I lived with you for seven years and now the only people I’ll share quarters with are girls or a hypothetical lover, so help me god. Other such excuses he pulled out of his arse to avoid telling the truth. When he finally signed the lease on the room in Lower Holloway it felt like he’d made it out of the Judean Desert after forty days and forty nights of temptation. As a result, Sirius didn’t speak to him for a week.

Now he’s got the irrefutable, neon yellow proof that he can’t afford what has to be the shittiest flat in London, and he’s got Sirius standing in front of him in said shitty flat with his arms folded across his chest. The worst part is that he has no alternative—while the notice said he had thirty days to clear out, the thought of staying put between these four walls until then is, quite suddenly, intolerable. Cornered and taking quick stock of his available resources, he decides to make use of the one advantage he has over Sirius in this moment (a physical and petty one: his height) and looks down his nose at him as he mutters, “I’ll get my things.”

He feels Sirius’s gaze boring into his back as he gathers his clothes and he has to resist the childish urge to spin around and point out that this situation, by the way, is hardly his own fault. What with the war and his mother’s cancer diagnosis he had to drop out of Gowerton, the magical college at UCL, a few months ago shortly after completing the first year of his Magical Theory degree. He was living off of the combined income from his stipend and a part-time job at the college library, but was only allowed to keep the latter after dropping out and he hasn’t had much luck holding down other jobs in the meantime due to his condition. He’s not sure if Sirius is aware of that last bit—after getting fired from his third menial Muggle job in as many months, it stopped feeling like shareable news.

He stuffs his clothes haphazardly into his rucksack and goes to the windowsill to pick up the sad-looking spathiphyllum that he decides he’s newly determined to nurse back to health. Tucking the pot under his arm, he turns back to Sirius and gives a perfunctory nod.

Expressionless, Sirius holds out his arm; Remus is grateful he didn’t have to ask. He takes hold just above the elbow, the leather of Sirius’s jacket soft and warm under his fingertips. Then Sirius turns on the spot and the blackness swallows them up.

His feet slam down on the hardwood floor and his knees immediately crackle in protest. He lets go of Sirius’s arm and inhales deeply, the wind having been knocked out of him in transit. Sirius has brought them directly into the living room; the curtains are drawn on the three large palladian windows that line the far wall and light is pouring in, the milky expanse of sky outside blending almost seamlessly with the white, nearly-bare walls. 

When James lived in the second bedroom, the flat looked like a larger version of his corner of the dormitory at Hogwarts: Gryffindor banners draped from the ceiling and the walls were plastered with ever-moving posters of the Weird Sisters and the Wimbourne Wasps. Despite the fact that he’s been living alone for a while now, it seems Sirius still isn’t sure what to do with the space now that it’s wholly his. Remus once saw what looked like the beginnings of an alphabetically-arranged display of LP covers on the wall above the sofa, but it petered out by _ Electric Mud _ and the next time Remus came over the project had been abandoned and the wall was blank again.

He walks over to the wall of windows and sets the spathiphyllum carefully on the centre sill, then pulls out his wand and gives it a quick _ Aguamenti._ Satisfied, he shrugs out of his rucksack and jacket and lays them on the floral wingback armchair, then turns around to find Sirius leaning against the front door staring at him.

“What,” Remus says.

“Wormtail told me you’d be with your mum for the moon this month. In the cellar.”

He did tell Peter that, didn’t he. Remus looks away and scrubs a hand over his face.

“She run out of dittany, then?”

“What?”

“Your hands.”

He looks down. The flesh across his knuckles is torn up and freshly scabbed, his fingernails encrusted with dried blood.

“You’ve got fucking twigs in your hair, too. I may be pretty, but I’m not stupid.”

Sirius is glaring at the floor, intently picking at a scuff on the rug with the toe of his combat boot. He never looks more elegant (and, Remus always realises a beat too late, never more like a Black) than when he’s angry. Remus watches his profile—his furrowed brows and the vertical crease between them, his aquiline nose and flared nostrils, his shapely upper lip lifted slightly at the corner to complete the scowl—until he has to swallow and look away again. He opens his mouth, to say what exactly he has no idea, when Sirius cuts him off.

“Don’t, Remus. I know you can’t tell me where you really were, so just....” He runs a hand through his hair wearily, the anger seeming to dissipate as he does so. Then he sighs and makes a flippant gesture. “Just sit down and I’ll make tea. No sugar.” He saunters into the kitchen, and a moment later Remus hears the clang of the kettle being set on the stove.

He sits down on the sofa and immediately it’s as though he’s melting into it, though it’s hardly squishy; it’s been a long time, he realises, since he’s felt this wrung-out. Vague suggestions of emotions gloss over his consciousness and slip away before having the chance to permeate, and even the hot slash of angry embarrassment he felt five minutes ago now feels distant and blurred. It’s not an uncommon sensation right after the full moon—it’s his brain as well as his body that belonged to an animal only hours ago—but it’s disconcerting now, given these precise circumstances. He is staying in Sirius’s flat, with Sirius, for the foreseeable future. He tells this to himself very sternly in a complete sentence to provoke an emotional response, but his only palpable reaction is physical—it’s as though his stomach has become disentangled from the rest of his organs and is floating around his body serenely at its own discretion.

Sirius reenters the living room then, holding two mugs of steaming tea. He wordlessly hands one (perfectly caramel-coloured) to Remus, then sits down next to him. He shifts a few times, the sofa springs creaking as he does so (it was a kerb find—something Remus has difficulty reconciling with the Persian rug Sirius bought at Harrods for three times his monthly rent) until he ends up cross-legged, a few careful inches separating his knee from Remus’s thigh.

“Been a while,” Sirius mutters into his mug, breaking the silence.

“Guess it has.” As if he isn’t acutely aware. “Not since—”

“Right.” Sirius sets his mug down on the coffee table and rests his chin in his hands, staring at the floor.

“How’s he doing?” Remus prompts. “Have you seen him recently?”

“Last night. That’s why—that’s part of why I showed up at your flat today, actually. I came bearing tidings.”

“Of comfort and joy, I hope?”

Sirius doesn’t laugh, so Remus braces himself and waits. _ A lover’s fatal identity is precisely this_, he recites to himself derisively, but in the end he doesn’t have to wait long: Sirius presses the heels of his hands into his eyes and says on a massive exhale, “He’s going to ask Lily to marry him.”

Remus blinks. “Oh.” The shock, if he can even call it that, is brief. “Well. That’s—”

“The stupidest thing you’ve ever heard?”

“I would’ve said understandable, actually,” Remus says carefully. “I mean—stupid, yes, impulsive, yes. But they’re stupid and impulsive, they both are. And given what happened to James....”

“I know,” Sirius says, quieter now. “It’s the war. I know.” He picks sullenly at a scab through a hole in the knee of his jeans. Remus watches, transfixed, as he works a fingernail under it and peels it off slowly.

“I just think,” Remus begins, as beads of dark blood rise to the surface of the newly exposed skin, “I mean, I’m sure _ they’re _ in a mindset now where they think… you know. There’s not much use in putting things off anymore.”

Sirius smears the blood away with his thumb and looks at him, and Remus wonders if he’s said too much. Normally he can read Sirius’s face with just a glance, like a book that’s not only open but highlighted and underlined in red ink. Now it’s unreadable, his eyes like opaque storm clouds.

“Now or never, as it were,” Sirius says with a grin that doesn’t meet his eyes.

Remus says nothing, and with great effort stops this all too familiar train of thought in its tracks. If he rides it out to the end he’s not sure he would be able to come back.

“You should sleep,” Sirius says then, and immediately, as though it were a hypnotic suggestion, Remus realises how heavy his limbs are. With some difficulty he stands and follows Sirius into James’s old bedroom, where a bare mattress still lays on the wooden bed frame he didn’t bother to take with him. Sirius waves his wand at the closet, out of which flutter a set of scarlet flannel sheets and a duvet. Like something out of a fairy godmother's cottage the fitted sheet stretches over the mattress, pillows burrow into cases, and the top sheet even makes a lazy attempt at folding its own hospital corners.

“Impressive,” Remus says, though he knows that’s simply the way Flitwick taught them the charm. “I—hey. Thanks, Padfoot.” Try as he might it comes out as a mumble, and he wonders then where he might be right now if Sirius hadn’t shown up at his flat that afternoon. Part of him believes there’s almost nothing he wouldn’t do to avoid an implied _ I told you so_, but another part of him, in the end, isn’t so sure. It usually happens that whenever he feels he has nowhere to go, he goes to Sirius.

“’Course.” Sirius offers him another fleeting half-grin before exiting the room and shutting the door quietly behind him.

Remus shuts the venetian blinds on all four windows, throwing the room into the precise quality of hazy dim light that he’s always associated with the day after the full moon, a makeshift darkness for when he needs it most. Then, limbs aching, he gets undressed and slides between the soft sheets. He’s asleep before his body has finished sinking into the mattress.

When he wakes up the clock on the bedside table reads half past midnight and there’s a curry in a takeaway container waiting for him, kept warm by magic. Reaching for the lamp, he realises his knuckles have been bandaged in gauze.

He gets up and slips on some clean clothes, trying not to think about the fact that Sirius was in here while he slept, naked. Then he inches the bedroom door open. What he can see of the rest of the flat is dark, the living room lit only by harsh streetlamp outside. But at the other end of the corridor from Remus’s room, Sirius’s bedroom door is ajar and the flickering glow of candlelight is seeping out into the hall. No sound is coming from within, and Remus pauses, somewhat unnerved for a reason he can’t quite place.

Before he can stand there wondering too much longer, his stomach gives a colossal grumble and he’s left with little choice but to retreat into his room and see to his dinner.

+

The truth is that he’s kept this love on the back burner of his heart for so many years that he’s grown accustomed to the smell and can sometimes almost ignore it completely. He likes to think he’s made peace with the fact that he’ll never know what it tastes like. Still there are times when the pot boils over and it’s like he can feel it physically, the bubbling in his chest, cooking his insides and threatening to surge up his esophagus and out his mouth, scalding everything within its reach. 

Three weeks ago he, Sirius, Peter, Lily, and Marlene McKinnon were sitting in the emergency waiting room at St Mungo’s, each of them in varying states of insobriety and fearing the worst. It was the night of Sirius’s twentieth birthday and they’d been partying at Lily and James’s flat not twenty minutes prior, some two dozen people packed into the tiny half-furnished living room. James and Dorcas Meadowes had been surveilling an abandoned warehouse in Lambeth suspected to be a Death Eater stronghold and were to join them soon after midnight. At around a quarter till, one of the Prewetts had produced some coke from a back pocket and though Remus had already smoked a spliff and a half he had found himself doing a considerably-sized bump off Caradoc Dearborn’s fingertip. This of course was a mistake, as Remus had ended things with him some three months prior, and sure enough Caradoc had taken the opportunity to inquire ungracefully about his plans later. 

He hadn’t had to stall for very long. At that moment, Alastor Moody’s patronus had appeared in a flash of bright light that seemed to suck all the sound out of the room—even the record player had short-circuited and stuttered to a halt.

“_Potter and Meadowes critically injured in the line of duty. En route to St Mungo’s_.” Remus had heard the words as they issued from the mouth of the silvery hawk in Moody’s voice, but they had been mere sounds; empty signifiers. It wasn’t until he and the others had met the real Moody at St Mungo’s and heard the facts firsthand that the gravity of the situation had settled at the bottom of his stomach like lead, heavy and growing heavier. 

Peter was getting sick in the loo and on Remus’s left Sirius was fidgeting like an addict, both legs bouncing in different rhythms while his hands clenched and unclenched incessantly on the arms of his wooden chair. Lily was on Remus’s other side, silently stroking Marlene’s hair as Marlene sobbed drunkenly into her shoulder. In his high Remus’s brain was a whirlpool, the same morbid thoughts circling and repeating endlessly on a downward trajectory towards he didn’t know what. He stared at Lily and Marlene’s clasped hands and wondered what it must be like, to be experiencing precisely the same type of fear as the person next to you. His gaze drifted to Sirius.

He was scratching his knee through the ever-present hole in his jeans, his gaze unfocused, seemingly unaware that he had broken the skin. Without thinking, Remus grabbed Sirius’s hand and dragged it away, wiped the blood from his fingertips with the sleeve of his own jumper. Then he tightened his grip on Sirius’s hand and didn’t let go. He held it like Lily held Marlene’s—not with intertwined fingers but in a desperate grasp, as though he had been drowning and someone on deck had tossed him a rope. Sirius looked at their hands and then up at Remus, and though Remus still wasn’t able to put a name to what he was feeling he saw it reflected in Sirius’s stricken face and bloodshot eyes.

He almost said it then. He felt it at the back of his throat like bile, creeping towards his tongue; his breath quickened and his vision swam. “Fuck,” he muttered instead, and then he shut his eyes tight and kept them shut until a Healer came to fetch them. 

“Stable condition”: again, Remus hadn’t known what the words truly meant until the five of them were crowded awkwardly in the tiny room where James and Dorcas lay side by side. Marlene sat by Dorcas’s bed and held her hand while she slept; the whole left side of her face was bandaged, her Afro badly singed and her arms covered in furious red welts and burns. James was propped up in bed and though he’d grinned when he saw them he had done so with some apparent difficulty. The Healer had said he’d been partially paralysed by an unknown curse, though she’d assured them the cause was neurological rather than physical and that with treatment and therapy it would most likely abate within a week. James’s dark complexion was ashen and his glasses were off, and without them he looked exhausted and very young. 

It seemed none of them knew what to say. Remus perched on the foot of the bed while Lily sat beside it with her head on James’s chest; Peter kept mumbling things like “Can’t believe it” and “So glad you’re all right mate” and then devolving into hiccuping fits, and Sirius stood by the door, biting his nails silently. Remus knew he was dying for a cigarette.

After what couldn’t have been more than five minutes the Healer poked her head back into the room to tell them that they should start saying their goodbyes for the night; reluctantly they did so. As Sirius approached the bed James focused his eyes intently on him.

“Need to speak t’you… alone.” His words were slurred and it sounded as though each one was causing him pain. They looked at each other for a moment, some wordless affirmation passing between them, and then Sirius glanced back at the others and nodded. Marlene and Peter shuffled out; Lily hesitated in the doorway looking back anxiously at James until Remus placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder.

“C’mon,” he said. “We’ll come back first thing tomorrow.”

By then it was nearly three in the morning. Peter and Marlene weren’t interested in waiting around for Sirius and neither, after a few minutes of pacing the hallway, was Lily. “I need to go home and clean the flat,” she announced, and then before Remus could offer to help, “No, it’ll be cathartic. Believe me.” She hugged him, exhaling deeply into his shoulder. Then she was gone.

Remus leaned against the wall opposite James and Dorcas’s room and closed his eyes. Even with the great looming threat of loss diffused for the time being, he didn’t think he could ever relax in this place. The last time he’d been at St Mungo’s he’d been five years old and barely conscious, but little details—the pattern in the ceiling tiles and the acrid combination of blood and magic and potions innumerable on the air—kept prodding at his memory as though with a hot fire iron.

Shortly after receiving a second pointed glance from a passing Healer, the door across the hall finally opened and Sirius stepped out quietly. “Oh,” he said, spotting Remus as he shut the door behind him. “You didn’t have to wait up.”

Remus blinked; in all honesty it hadn’t occurred to him not to. “Yeah, well,” he said lamely and jerked his head towards the exit sign. In silence they fell into stride, following the glowing signage through a labyrinth of corridors until they arrived at a nondescript door that opened out onto the mews behind Purge and Dowse, the ostensibly abandoned department store that housed the hospital.

As he suspected, the door hadn’t even fully closed behind them before Sirius reached into his jacket pocket for a cigarette. Remus took the one that was offered to him and stuck it between his lips. Sirius leaned towards him—he had used his lavender soap that morning—and snapped his fingers to light it wandlessly the way he’d been doing since Marlene had taught him how in sixth year, during the month or two they'd dated before she had realised she was a lesbian. His hands were trembling, though, and all that appeared was a brief spark that disappeared as quickly as his magic had summoned it.

“Here,” Remus murmured after a few more failed attempts, and with a few clumsy snaps of his own fingers he lit his and then Sirius’s cigarette. Sirius closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, holding the smoke in his lungs as though it were pot before exhaling a neat stream of it into the night air.

“Thanks,” he said. He ran a hand through his tangled hair, cleared his throat. “I—look, do you want to walk? I don’t think I want to Apparate right now.”

“Sure.”

“You can say no. I just—”

“I’ll walk with you. Unless you wanted to be alone—?”

“No. I mean, I don’t _ not _want to be alone, I just meant like, you can do what you want.”

Four hours previously, after much cajoling (everyone had been doing it, at Sirius’s own insistence) Remus had taken an ill-advised and messy tequila shot out of Sirius’s belly button. Now they were tip-toeing clumsily around each other like two kids at their first ballet class. “Let’s go, then,” Remus said, trying to keep the frown out of his voice, and together they walked through the mews and out onto the main road.

Marylebone was quiet that time of night, the boutiques and Georgian mansions dark and shuttered up against the early November chill. There was no one else in sight—a rarity for London, and something Remus always missed about his hometown, where he could slip out the back door of their cottage late at night when his parents couldn’t manage to fight quietly and walk into town on the high street and not see a single soul. On those nights he was likely to end up on Llangollen Bridge, throwing rocks into the river as prescribed by the trappings of moody teenagedom or something, then go home and write Sirius a rambling letter about it. _ What a coincidence_, Sirius had once replied the summer after fifth year, not long before he ran away from home, _ the other night the old lady threw a cursed Assyrian vase at my head so I hopped on the tube to go chuck rocks into the Thames. Do you think Prongs and Wormtail get up to such broody misfit behaviour too? Or are they simply not quite as Counterculture as us? _

They walked in silence up Great Portland Street, bypassing Regents Park—its wrought iron gates long since closed for the night—and continuing north up the Hampstead Road. Remus was still coming down and in his head were someone else’s words, recited again and again on a feverish loop: _ What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? _ On and on until they reached the Camden High Street, passed the Greek Orthodox church, and turned at last onto Sirius’s street. 

As they were rounding the corner Sirius cleared his throat and Remus nearly jumped in surprise. “Do you think…” he began in a voice hoarse from disuse, “people who come from bad families, or… bad circumstances. Do you think it makes them bad people? Like, inherently?”

They had reached the doorstep of Sirius’s building, the brown brick almost colourless in the wan light from the streetlamps. Before the party Sirius had painstakingly lined his eyes with kohl he’d stolen from Lily and now it was smudged, minuscule black flecks in the corners of his eyes like someone had flicked an inky quill at him from a distance. 

Remus swallowed. “Well, John Locke would certainly have us think so.”

“I’m not talking about nature versus nurture,” Sirius said, his lip curling contemptuously on the last three words. “Or maybe I am, but... it’s not what I mean.”

He’d guessed as much. Once when he was fifteen and on a self-loathing kick Remus had gone into the archives at the Hogwarts library to find an op-ed his father had penned for the _ Prophet _ some ten years previously. He’d known of its existence for years—his mother, perhaps to a fault, had raised him with the firm belief that children should never be lied to, and so had answered him truthfully when he asked, age seven, why _ he’d _ been bitten by a werewolf and not Rhys Roberts who had pushed him over in the park that afternoon and was clearly more deserving. At any rate he’d never sought the article out, primarily due to the workings of a vague self-preservation instinct. But that winter night he had been alone in the library and it hadn’t been two weeks since the incident with Snape and James and, of course, Sirius, and so Remus—then in a state of near constant turmoil and seeking the worst kind of release—had found himself rifling manically through the _ Prophet _ archives until he found it: _ The Case for Werewolf Culling — By Lyall Lupin_. It was dated 9 June 1965, exactly five days before Remus had been bitten. He’d read it through twice, his eyes lingering each time on the final paragraph: “_No Dark creature is more heinous, none more utterly beyond redemption than the werewolf, for though it walks among us and is to the untrained eye even indistinguishable from us, it could not be less human. It is a soulless creature, capable only of evil and deserving nothing but death._” Halfway through his third time reading it Remus had realised he was no longer taking in the words. Instead, with an ease that had unnerved him, he was imagining Fenrir Greyback crumpling the newspaper up in a grimy, hairy fist and pondering with relish what form his revenge would take. 

He did not say any of this to Sirius now, but Sirius still said to him, “You understand what I mean.” He slightly emphasised the _ you_, and he didn’t say it like a question but there was still a slight waver in his voice. The space between them on the sidewalk had grown smaller somehow. “It’s just… something I think about, sometimes.”

Remus’s mouth had gone dry. “I think about it too,” he said.

Sirius stepped closer. In the stark shadows cast from the streetlamp his eyes were as black and shiny as onyx. The fingertips of one hand brushed up Remus’s arm and came to rest on the back of his neck; his hand was heavy and cool, and as an uncontrollable shiver ran up Remus’s spine he thought wildly, _ Take me upstairs, let me in, invite me in_, like some vampiric incantation. For the first time the thought entered his mind that what he had wanted for so long might well be within his grasp, and as he looked down into Sirius’s eyes he understood he was approaching the precipice. But before he had the chance to peer over the edge, something strange passed over Sirius’s face and he blinked.

“Get home safe, Moony,” he murmured, and then the weight on the back of Remus’s neck was gone and by the time he managed to come to his senses Sirius was stepping inside his building and shutting the front door behind him.

+

Sirius isn’t around when Remus wakes up, so he takes advantage of the moment of privacy to stick his head in the fireplace and Floo Dumbledore. He finds him sitting in a poofy chintz armchair by the fireplace in his office as though he were expecting Remus to call right then and there, and he’s knitting by hand with sparkly purple yarn a garment Remus doesn’t think he could possibly identify.

“Glad to see you looking healthy and well-rested, my dear boy,” Dumbledore says amiably, which Remus takes to mean, _ Cheers for not getting beaten up too badly on your first assignment_. He has to resist the urge to itch his nose conspicuously with his bandaged hand. 

“I appreciate you finding a fireplace for this, as well,” Dumbledore continues, the clicking of his golden knitting needles punctuating his speech irritatingly. “Are you at James and Lily’s, then?”

“Sirius’s,” Remus replies reluctantly. _ Like it’s your business_.

“Ah.” Dumbledore pauses his knitting to peer at him over the rims of his half-moon spectacles, his blue eyes glinting green in the firelight. Remus shifts uncomfortably on Sirius’s tiled hearth. “Well, I trust he is out of earshot?”

“Of course,” Remus says evenly.

“Good. Then, Remus, if you please—tell me everything.”

Afterwards, Sirius’s flat feels unbearably small so Remus leaves and walks to Saint Martin’s Gardens, where he sits on a bench and tries very hard not to think. It’s a blustery day, the naked trees swaying tall and spindly against the opaque curtain of grey sky. A line of hand-holding children from the Catholic primary school around the corner traipses past, giggling in their ill-fitting uniforms as they follow their teacher back to the schoolyard. The last one uses her free hand to thumb her nose at Remus as she passes. He sticks his tongue out at her.

Soon it starts to rain, tiny dark droplets peppering the pavement, so he gets up and walks to the tube station; he’s not supposed to be at the library for another two hours but maybe if he shows up early they’ll let him bill the extra time.

He returns to Sirius’s flat around nine that evening and from the hallway he can hear _ More Songs About Buildings and Food_—Remus’s copy, he forgot he’d left it here some months ago—playing at what has to be close to full volume. He goes inside and as he’s hanging up his jacket in the coat closet the music quiets by several decibels; turning around, he sees Sirius standing in the doorway to the kitchen with his arms folded tightly across his chest. 

“Where have—I didn’t know where you were.”

Remus frowns as he toes off his trainers. Part of him wants to say _ Is that so_, and leave it at that. Or maybe, _ I didn’t know where _ you _ were for the past three weeks_, but that feels a bit like low-hanging fruit. Sirius’s hair is slightly frizzy in the unseasonable humidity and there are shadows pooled under his eyes, and the truth is that Remus doesn’t want to pick a fight, though he knows it would be all too easy. 

“I was at work,” he says.

Sirius’s tense shoulders visibly fall. “Oh. Right.”

“I would’ve mentioned it this morning but you weren’t around.”

It’s a clear invitation—I showed you mine, now you show me yours. But Sirius averts his eyes and mutters vaguely, “I was running errands,” and Remus thinks, well that’s that, then.

“How are you feeling,” Sirius says then, before the silence can drag on.

“Oh, er, fine. I mean, knackered, but. I slept a lot and I can sit down at work.” Sirius nods slowly and Remus feels stupid, talking about nothing like this. “Thanks for, erm.” He lifts his hands vaguely; thanks to the dittany Sirius put on them he was able to take the bandages off before work. “You didn’t have to do that.”

Sirius just shrugs. “I made a stir-fry,” he says. “I don’t know if you’ve eaten.”

Remus shakes his head and follows Sirius to the kitchen, where indeed there is a heaping pile of chicken and vegetables in the wok on the stove. “You’d better be careful,” Remus says as he gets a plate from the cupboard. “Keep feeding me every night and I might have no choice but to get used to it.”

“Get used to it, then,” Sirius says, sitting down across the table. There’s a slight edge to his voice that Remus hears nonetheless, and Sirius must as well because he clears his throat and adds more amiably, “I’m the hostess with the mostess, after all.”

They lapse into silence as Remus eats and Sirius sips a stemless glass of wine—a pinot noir according to the label on the bottle, which he’s taken to drinking ever since Lily mentioned offhandedly in the liquor store several months ago that it was a red wine for people who don’t like reds. 

“_We are two strangers, we might never have met_,” David Byrne is singing now. “_We can talk forever_.”

Remus glances at Sirius and chews his lip. He’s stopped trying to keep track of the ways in which his friends have changed since joining the Order less than eighteen months ago. The subtle atmospheric shifts that coalesce into something astronomical; the kind of changes you don’t notice until you wake up one morning to find the planet has tipped completely off its axis. With James it’s manifested in a newfound cautiousness where he used to be rash, subdued by the weight of responsibility. Lily, never before a worrier, has been known in recent months to make herself sick with anxiety. Oddest perhaps has been Peter, who’s become increasingly outspoken and has even started to bite back, cuttingly, when met with Sirius’s customary needling. 

With Sirius himself, though, it’s less that something about him has changed and more the feeling that something is missing from him. Where he used to fill up entire rooms with his explosive presence, his now frequent silences are cavernous. Remus never used to have to wonder what he was thinking, so bluntly and immediately did he announce exactly what was on his mind; now he’s more likely to brood, leaving Remus to decipher the nuances of his various sullen expressions. He’s less quick to anger and less quick to laugh, and it terrifies Remus like little else ever has. Everything is falling away, everything about their lives as they knew them is slipping towards the great drain at the centre of things, and for Remus, the thing he wants to hold onto the most seems at times to be the furthest thing from his reach.

“So what’s up with you and Dearborn?” Sirius asks suddenly. His voice is even but rather loud, and the question is so far removed from anything that was even on the periphery of Remus’s mind that he just gapes at him.

“What.”

Sirius purses his lips. “Well I noticed the two of you, shall we say _ fraternising _ at my birthday party and so—I just wondered. I thought you broke up.” His gaze is unflinching but he’s swirling his wine glass so rapidly the contents are little more than a pink blur.

“Oh,” says Remus, his brain slowly returning to normal processing speed though he can still feel his cheeks burning. “Well, I don’t know if I’d call it breaking up since we were never really... you know.” 

Sirius cocks an eyebrow at him. “James mentioned the other night that he’d seen him recently and he asked about you.”

“I—oh, fuck’s sake,” Remus huffs. “Is that what you two do in your free time, then? Gossip about my sex life?”

“Only once I’m through gabbing about my own,” Sirius says. “But by then it’s usually long past my bedtime.” The buttery overhead light glints off an eyetooth and Remus realises with a tightening feeling in his chest how much he’s missed Sirius’s smile, cocky and mischievous as ever.

“Well,” he says, “to answer your question, no, I’m certainly not seeing him again nor do I plan to. I suppose, I don’t know—he _ is _ the only other Welshman in the Order. Can’t go around burning all my bridges, can I.”

He meant it as a joke, but for some reason Sirius’s grin flickers. “No,” he says, looking away and drumming the tabletop with the fingers of one hand. “I don’t suppose you’d want to do that.” He drains what’s left in his wine glass and pushes his chair out from the table; it scrapes horribly against the wooden floorboards and an unpleasant shiver runs across Remus’s scalp. “I’m gonna go to—bed, or shower or something,” Sirius says, and then he’s sloping out of the kitchen and Remus is left sitting at the table, bewildered.

+

Two days meander by. Remus spends them working at the Gowerton library, smoking joints, scouring Muggle newspapers for flats and jobs, and generally keeping Sirius at arm’s length. It’s easier than he anticipated, even though they’re living under the same roof, since Sirius spends the majority of his time out on various errands for purposes he can’t or won’t divulge. When they are together they’ll make dinner with the record player turned up loud to drown out the silence, and sometimes Remus will catch Sirius looking at him with a curious narrow-eyed expression, like he’s trying to figure something out. And every night—Remus knows because he fell into the habit of checking after the first time—Sirius’s bedroom door is left ajar, with candlelight flickering from within well into the morning hours.

It’s half past midnight now and Remus is trying and failing to fall asleep. He’s been staring at the long jagged crack in the ceiling for so long that in the ghostly streetlight from outside it almost looks like it’s twitching. All at once he realises the futility of this strategy and he sits up so fast he gets a bit lightheaded. He wrestles his way out of the duvet which has tangled around his legs and pulls on a flannel shirt and pyjama bottoms, then pads to the door and opens it gently.

The flat is dark and, as he’s come to expect, Sirius’s door at the other end of the hallway is ajar. This time, though, rather than just looking and wondering, Remus finds himself walking towards it. He goes slowly, the Oriental runner soft under his bare feet. Maybe staring at the crack in the ceiling for so long put him in a sort of self-induced hypnosis, because his mind is strangely empty as he edges closer, and with his eyes fixed on the warm glow of the candlelight he almost forgets to blink. 

He’s about two feet from the door when he steps on a loose floorboard and a drawn out _ creeeak _ wrenches through the still air. Remus freezes. From inside he hears the rustling of blankets and quiet footsteps, and then the door swings inward.

“Moony,” Sirius says, a half-question. The candle is sitting on his palm in a little brass holder and lit by it from below Sirius looks a bit spooky, all stark shadows and quivering yellow light. The dark mass of his hair is falling into his eyes and he combs his fingers through it absently, pushing it back in a way that reminds Remus a bit of James when he would catch sight of Lily at school. “Can’t you sleep?” Sirius asks in a low voice.

Remus swallows thickly.

“Been sleeping like shit lately myself,” Sirius continues when he doesn’t respond.

The t-shirt he’s wearing to sleep in is a few sizes too large, and Remus’s eyes linger on the pale ridge of exposed collarbone at the neckline.

“Moony?”

The greenish afterimage from the candlelight is dancing like a demon in his periphery and his heart is hammering in his chest.

“Remus…” Sirius says, and now he’s frowning, and there’s a flash of something—anger? disappointment?—in his eyes. “If you don’t have anything to say, I’m going to go to bed.”

“Wait.” The spell breaks, and Remus realises with a tidal wave of clarity why he’s here. “The night of your birthday,” he says, suddenly urgent, “at St Mungo’s. What… what did James say to you?”

Sirius stares up at him with wide eyes, the vertical crease delving between his brows. Then he glances away. “He told me who attacked him and Dorcas,” he says in a low monotone. “One of them was Bellatrix. Her mask was on but he could tell by the hair.” He shifts from one foot to the other and takes a shuddering breath. “The other one—his mask fell off, and James could see his face in the wand light, and—it was Regulus.”

+

The first time his friends saw the bite, he was thirteen and changing into his pyjamas in the dormitory with the curtains of his four-poster inadvisably drawn open. He’d always kept them shut for this purpose, religiously so, even with the other three having embraced varying degrees of nudism around each other since first year, but that night his mind was elsewhere. He’d just had his first kiss in the library with Suzy MacIntyre (his thoughts drifting the entire time to the looming deadline on their Ancient Runes group project), and he figured it was time to finally acknowledge some truths that he’d so far mostly been able to ignore. Anyway he at least had his pants on, but his shirt was off and it was then that James, Peter, and Sirius burst in.

“Blimey, Moony,” Peter blurted as Remus wrenched his shirt back over his head. “Is that what I think it is?”

“No,” Remus said, inanely.

“Bit gruesome, innit?”

“You know, I was wondering why I’d never seen the Chomp before,” James said as he kicked his trainers off, sending them flying halfway across the room. “I wondered if it might be someplace where the sun don’t shine, if you catch my drift—”

“You’ll both catch my fist in your face if you don’t shut up,” Sirius drawled. He was sprawled across his bed on his stomach and was looking at Remus from under his heavy black fringe. In those days, with the haircut and the softer edges to his face, he looked less like a disgraced and brooding scion of Dark nobility and more like a plucky young member of the Addams Family.

James responded with some biting rejoinder or other and from there the attention of the room was safely diverted from Remus, who, cheeks still burning, slid his curtains closed and didn’t emerge the rest of the night.

Some time later, when James’s snores were reverberating off the walls and Remus was lying awake in bed wondering what he had done in his short miserable life to deserve the godawful one-two punch of being a Gay Werewolf, his curtains rustled and Sirius poked his head through the gap.

“Moony,” he hissed. “You asleep?”

“What do you want.”

In lieu of answering, Sirius clambered onto Remus’s bed. He took the pillow Remus wasn’t using and fluffed it meticulously before leaning against the headboard and drawing his knees up to his chest. Unsure of what else to do, Remus sat up next to him and crossed his ankles awkwardly under the covers. For a moment they just sat there, the space lit only by the beam of moonlight shining through the gap Sirius had left in the curtains.

“In the house,” Sirius began with no voice, then cleared his throat and started over, “in the house where I grew up? You know, Grimmauld Place? We’ve got this tapestry in the drawing room showing the Black family tree. It was started in, I don’t know, the thirteenth century I think, and it goes from the Middle Ages to the present day. A thousand years, and I think it mostly follows the male line but still there are like, hundreds of people on there.”

Remus nodded slowly; he wasn’t sure why Sirius was in his bed well after midnight telling him about an old tapestry, but with nothing else to anchor him in the darkness he found himself clinging to every word.

“They’re all wizard supremacists,” Sirius continued, and though his voice was still low he had started speaking more rapidly. “I know you know—I mean everyone knows the Blacks are obsessed with being Pureblood but like, nobody really—_knows_—” He had begun itching his forearm agitatedly; Remus turned to look at him in the dim light, but Sirius’s eyes were fixed straight ahead. “The _ rituals _ they do, these like blood magic rituals—I haven’t had to, to take part yet, but I’ve had to watch. And my dad, he keeps entire shelves stocked with ancient grimoires full of the most _ gruesome_—like, Muggle torture and shit, it’s—” 

He had only done it to stop Sirius from hurting himself, but still—Remus had reached over and grabbed Sirius’s hand. And then dropped it almost immediately, his heart stuttering painfully in his chest. 

“Sorry,” he said hastily, face on fire, “you just—you shouldn’t scratch yourself.”

Sirius looked at him, but in the dark Remus couldn’t make out his expression. After a moment during which Remus feared his heart might beat straight out of his chest Sirius said, “Look at this,” and stuck the hand Remus had grabbed into the shaft of moonlight streaming through the curtains.

Remus squinted at what Sirius was showing him. On the side of his hand, near the root of his pinky finger, there was a prominent, puckered scar about the size of a Knut that Remus had never seen before. 

“The deal with the tapestry is that if you’re a blood traitor you get your name blasted off,” Sirius said. “The ratio is pretty low, though, and for most everyone else… well there are only so many ways to keep all those generations absolutely pure.” 

Remus blinked as it dawned on him. “Oh.”

“Yeah.” Sirius shifted awkwardly next to him. “My parents are first cousins—my mother was actually a Black even before she married.” He wrinkled his nose. “And there were others doing the same thing or worse before them, so. So here I come out looking like a mild freak-show exhibit. It got removed right away but if you ask me they sort of botched it.” He brought his hand out of the light and crossed his arms tightly over his chest. “Could’ve been worse, though,” he added, “a couple of my French cousins have, like, a Habsburg jaw thing going on.” He paused, and then said, quieter, “I’ve actually never told that to anyone before. Not even James.”

“Really?” Remus had been under the impression that Sirius and James told each other everything.

“Yeah. Wasn’t really planning on ever telling anyone, actually, but—I don’t know. It’s like, I’ve got this scar that’s kind of a reminder of, like, a part of my life that’s fucked up? And, well, not to put too fine a point on it but I thought if anyone could relate....”

“Right,” Remus said, smiling weakly and wiping his sweaty palms on the blankets in his lap. He knew Sirius was sharing what amounted to a revelation, but it couldn’t compete with the one happening in his own head.

For two years he’d been wondering why his friendships with James and Peter felt easy when his friendship with Sirius did not. Much of the time he was able to chalk up their differences—of which there were many—to the fact that Sirius was excruciatingly, incurably posh and loathe to admit it; but then again this was a quality he shared with James, with whom Remus had never once bickered. Sirius also tended to be quite annoying, but of course this was something Remus thought about most boys his own age. Try as he might, he’d never been able to puzzle together why he felt differently about Sirius—not “different” as in “opposite,” but _ differently, _ in the vaguest, least indicative sense. The way he felt about Sirius he did not feel about other people. He’d never been able to get a more precise reading, so the margin of error was high. At times, after a thoughtlessly mean comment or a wanton display of selfishness, he would think maybe they just didn’t get along and shouldn’t be friends, plain and simple. But then Sirius would do something like ruthlessly hex Mulciber for calling Remus a fag in second year Herbology (earning Sirius two weeks of detention), or sidle over to Remus in the common room unasked to patiently help him through a tricky Potions equation, or turn to Remus after the execution of a particularly juicy prank to grin at him (directly and only at him) with absolute unbridled mirth, and Remus would think, no, I want you to stick around. I want to be on your side, whichever side that may be. Sitting with Sirius in the dark, the oldest silvery scar itching on his side and the peachy taste of Suzy’s chapstick still lingering on his lips, Remus felt with a nauseating clench of anxiety that maybe he had finally figured out why.

“Do you think it’s gross?” Sirius asked quietly.

“No—no,” Remus stuttered, stumbling out of his reverie. “I mean, it’s fucked up of course… but it’s not like it’s your fault.”

Sirius hummed and shifted slightly; now their shoulders were just barely touching. “Just promise you won’t tell anyone.”

Remus’s eyes had finally adjusted to the dark, so he could look at Sirius directly—though it was harder now than it had ever been before—when he said, “Don’t worry. I promise.”

+

In the streetlight streaming in through Sirius’s bedroom windows the scar on his hand is just visible, but only because Remus knows it’s there. They’re sitting on the bed passing a bottle of Ogden’s Old back and forth, Sirius’s knees drawn up to his chest and Remus’s legs stretched out in front of him, carefully crossed at the ankles to maintain a few inches of space between them.

“I’ve been trying to make contact with him over the past few weeks, since James told me,” Sirius says, setting the bottle on the bedside table. “Only I don’t know where he’s living, so actually what I’ve mostly been doing is going to Islington to spy on my parents.” He seems to consider a moment before grabbing the bottle again and taking another swig.

“What, like you’ve been hiding outside Grimmauld Place?”

Sirius nods as he passes the bottle to him. “Basically. I mean, I knew they’d never tell me where he was. So I did some research on surveillance magic and learnt a spell that like, plants a listening device on a person. They’re so obsessed with him I thought for sure they’d mention where he was living, what he was doing. Problem is they’re such freaks they literally never leave the house so I never got the chance, even though I was there at all hours as Padfoot, hanging out in the hydrangeas.” He runs a hand through his hair and leans back heavily, his head tipping back over the top of the headboard. “It was quite time-consuming actually. And I was kind of strung out about the whole thing, so. I’m sorry I went M.I.A. the past few weeks.” He looks at Remus directly under hooded lids to deliver the apology, and Remus accepts by handing the bottle back to him.

“Cheers. Anyway, I’m ready to give up on it.” Remus watches as he closes his eyes and brings the bottle to his lips, the intricate movements under the skin of his throat as he swallows. “Was a stupid plan and I don’t… I don’t even know what I’d say to him if I had the chance. Once you’re a Death Eater you can’t just quit, even if your big brother does manage to talk some sense into you.”

“Maybe the Order’d give him asylum,” Remus suggests halfheartedly, but it sounds false even as he says it.

“Hah. If he had a cleaner record maybe, but now....” Sirius’s drawn-up knees fall to one side so that he’s curled towards Remus, and in the streetlight his eyelashes cast long shadows on his cheekbones. “I just didn’t think he was capable of… I never thought he would _ actually _ do anything horrible even if he did join them. I mean, we were never close. I haven’t spoken to him in almost two years. But we looked out for each other in a way, and I guess I thought… well, I guess I thought I knew him better.”

“He was always just a scared little kid,” Remus says gently, “you know, underneath it all. It makes sense you’d still think of him that way.”

Sirius twists his mouth, picking absentmindedly at a hole in the afghan spread across the bed. “I just wonder,” he says slowly, “because at St Mungo’s that night, when Moody told us what happened, he gave me this look. I guess he’d seen James and learnt who’d done it by then because he gave me this evil fucking glare like I’d had something to do with it. And walking home with you I was thinking about it and I was… I was so angry, but I was also thinking, like, fuck, maybe he’s right to be suspicious, you know? I mean, we grew up together in that place, so if that scared little kid turned out to be capable of joining Voldemort and, and attempting murder, there’s no way I could’ve made it out unscathed, right?”

Remus’s chest is very tight, as though his body is doubling down trying to contain the wild thumping of his heart. It’s an odd feeling, hearing his own worst and most secret fears echoed back to him through someone else’s mouth, but Sirius is looking at him with desperate eyes and the sudden need to comfort him—not even with a lie, he realises, but with the truth—is so great that he suspects if he keeled over right then and there the words would come bursting out of him anyway like a death spasm. 

“Sirius, that’s… that certainly is the logic other people have adopted, but I don’t think it does you or, or me any good to think that way ourselves. Like… it’s the reason one side sees us as traitors and the other sees us as potential ones. They both tend to forget we have like, free fucking will and whatnot.”

He glances at Sirius long enough to note the intensity with which he’s being stared at, and in the beam of his gaze Remus feels an insane recklessness swelling within him like water boiling at the bottom of a geyser. “Listen,” he says, “I should tell you—the other night, during the moon... I wasn’t in Llangollen with my mum. I was on an Order mission.”

He didn’t realise how rigid Sirius’s body was until he sees the angle of his shoulders slope downwards, and he feels a pang of sympathy for him—it must be as relieving to hear the truth as it is to tell it. 

“Yeah,” Sirius says, the barest trace of a smile on his lips, “I, er. I figured.”

“I figured you figured,” Remus sighs, scrubbing a hand over his face. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before.”

“Keeping secrets is the modus operandi nowadays, remember?” Sirius says wryly. Then, peering at Remus apprehensively, he adds, “Just… tell me you weren’t with him.”

Remus shakes his head. “Not this time.” Sirius looks away and inhales deeply through his nose. 

“It was this pack living in the Forest of Dean,” Remus tells him. “They were suspected of having pro-Death Eater leanings, or at least their leader was, but when I got there—they were just teenagers. Five teenagers from South London. They’d been living in a homeless shelter for magical youth when they were turned. And the guy who turned them, who I was meant to keep an eye on—I guess he was more of a follower than a leader, because he up and abandoned them a few months ago. Looking to join Greyback’s pack, I imagine. And still I looked, you know, during the five days I was with these kids I looked for signs that they had been radicalised and were like, willing and able to do real harm.” He takes another drink, staring straight ahead, not trusting himself to meet Sirius’s gaze. “But I swear to god, in those five days the most violent thing I ever heard was one of the girls saying she’d like to castrate Simonius Selwyn for passing that anti-werewolf employment bill last month.”

Sirius gives a short bark of surprised laughter. “I’m sure you relayed that to the old man verbatim.”

Remus glances at him and grins, realising as he does so how close they’re sitting; all he’d have to do is extend his pinky finger and it would touch Sirius’s curled hand lying on the bed between them. “I told him they weren’t a threat,” he says. “To which he said—what did he say. ‘In sensitive situations such as these, I would caution you against letting emotion cloud your judgement.’”

Through the window behind them the headlights of a passing car swivel across the room, and in the brightly shifting light Sirius looks at him with slightly parted lips, his pupils huge, his eyes searching Remus’s face. “Sounds like shit advice if you ask me,” he murmurs.

Remus’s mouth is dry. He could’ve sworn he knew what they were talking about but now he thinks it may have changed; now he’s losing the plot. “Erm, point being,” he says, blinking rapidly, “point being, Sirius, you and I....” He stops the ill-boding sentence in its tracks and starts again. “It’s easy to forget, but—but there’s a difference, I think, between what we are and who we are? And the Order, and the people we’re fighting against, they only see the what. And—and sometimes when I’m feeling horrible, after the moon or otherwise, I look at myself and only see the what.”

Like magma smoothly shifting over stone, Sirius’s hand covers Remus’s, and the geyser bursts. In a voice that may never be steady again Remus says, “But that’s not what I see when I look at you, because—because I _ know _you, Sirius, I do, I know you like—”

“Remus—”

“—my own soul, which I know sounds fucking stu—”

He can taste the firewhiskey on Sirius’s mouth, but oddly enough it doesn’t burn. Despite the initial shock it’s a slow kiss, and a careful one, and after not so very long Remus brings his hand, carefully, to the side of Sirius’s face, his fingers curling around the shell of his ear.

“Wait.”

Remus starts, but Sirius holds firmly onto his shoulders before he can retreat. “It’s not that I want to stop,” Sirius says, his voice raspy, and indeed his eyes are fixed on Remus’s mouth, “it’s just—are you sure?”

“I didn’t think you were one to tread lightly about this sort of thing,” Remus counters breathlessly.

Sirius’s eyes leave Remus’s face long enough to roll up toward the heavens. “There are some things, _ Remus_, that even _ I _ don’t want to fuck up.” 

Remus blinks, but before the weight of that can settle Sirius continues, “Besides, this is more specific. I mean. You really did everything in your power not to live with me, if you recall. You’d rather live in a one-room hovel in Lower Hollo—”

“Okay, no need to insult the Matchbox, the earth is still fresh atop its grave....”

“Point stands.”

Remus chews his lip for a moment, distracted though he is by the fact that Sirius’s thigh is now pressed against his own. He sets the bottle of Ogden’s Old firmly on the bedside table and says, “Look, I know you think I love to suffer but—I’m not masochistic.”

“Have the past three days been masochistic for you?”

“A little.”

“Well how do you think I’ve felt.”

“I—” Remus splutters. “I don’t know—fine, I suppose, since it was your idea to kidnap me in the first place.”

“You suppose wrong. I have not been fine.”

His face is trying to be stern but his fingers are toying gently with a button on Remus’s flannel shirt, and Remus doesn’t trust himself enough to speak, so he waits.

“I… I never really let myself think about it too much,” Sirius says, an endearing drunken slur slipping into his voice as he addresses Remus’s shoulder. “Like, the way I felt about you. It seemed less complicated that way, but I think I was really just scared.”

Remus almost but does not tell him it was a good strategy. Certainly easier to deal with than the Molotov cocktail of anguish and love and anguish-in-love he’s had sloshing around his stomach for the better part of six years; a metaphor, he’s always figured, in which Sirius himself is the match.

“But after St Mungo’s that night, when we were on the sidewalk outside my flat, something changed. I think you felt it too.”

Remus nods slowly in answer to the glance Sirius shoots him.

“And since then… well like I said, I’ve been fucked up about Regulus. But I was also—I mean, I couldn’t stop thinking about—” He stops. “Fuck.” He covers his mouth with his hand, then runs the hand through his hair, and it’s only then that Remus realises how nervous Sirius is. And though his own heart is pounding frantically, the knowledge that Sirius is feeling the same ignites an almost irresistible desire to envelop him, to unzip his own skin and tuck Sirius safely into it.

“It’s like I’ve forgotten how to be around you, these past few days,” Sirius says from behind his fist. “I fucking hated not being with you for the moon. And then after, you were in the other room and I just wanted to, to take care of you, but I didn’t know how. I haven’t—I haven’t been sleeping, you make me feel so—”

“Your light was on every night,” Remus blurts stupidly. “You—I mean—maybe you could’ve slept if you’d turned it out.”

Jesus God, he thinks. He doesn’t even know what he was going for—levity, perhaps, in the face of the impossible things Sirius is telling him. In response Sirius purses his lips and lets out a long breath through his nose as though Remus has personally led him by the hand to his wit’s end. Remus can feel the warmth of it on his own face and his stomach turns over accordingly. “I left my door open and the light on,” Sirius says, his eyes pinched shut, “because I wanted you to come in.”

There’s a long pause as Remus considers this. Outside, a strong gust of howling wind buffets the building such that the window frames creak, and distantly, the part of Remus’s brain that houses his more-or-less functional self-preservation instinct sounds a feeble alarm. For all the hours he’s spent over the years imagining this moment, the amount of time he’s spent considering the wisdom of it is negligible. Those questions have always seemed irrelevant, residing as they do in reality where his fantasies have never made an appearance until now. As those two worlds converge, the shift palpable in the very air, Remus realises something very quickly: the idea of heeding the risks and walking away from Sirius now makes the alarm in his brain ring much, much louder.

“Well,” he says, sealing his own fate for better or for worse, “I’m here now. Guess the invitation had to be verbal.”

“You’ve been having me on,” Sirius says, the corner of his mouth twitching. “I thought you were a werewolf but you’ve been a vampire this whole time.”

“Don’t insult me,” Remus mutters, and kisses him.

Sirius’s mouth opens for him instantly with a soft groan that sounds like slipping into a hot bath, and Remus’s stomach goes into free fall. He twists the fingers of both hands into Sirius’s hair and pushes forward heedlessly, and then the fall is made actual as they tumble back onto the bed. Sirius lands on his back with a surprised huff of laughter against Remus’s mouth. They’re both grinning, stupidly and hugely such that Remus’s next kiss lands on Sirius’s front teeth; their mechanics are off-kilter one moment and in the next perfectly in sync, and it seems to Remus that this is the way it’s supposed to be, that surely the stuttering slide of Sirius’s tongue against his own is a small preordained function of some grand design.

He feels Sirius shift underneath him, his knees coming up to tighten around Remus’s hips before he surges upward and flips them over. Remus’s breath lets out in a whoosh as Sirius’s weight presses him into the mattress, and then hitches as Sirius’s mouth latches onto his throat. Sirius’s hands are in his hair and his thigh is pressing between Remus’s own, and the scent of him is everywhere, so heady and overwhelming that he’s partially relieved when Sirius leans back a few inches to fumble with the buttons of Remus’s shirt. But it doesn’t take long for the reprieve to feel like starvation, and when Sirius slips Remus’s shirt off his shoulders and sits back on his haunches to pull his own over his head, Remus follows him, sitting up and wrapping his arms around Sirius’s waist, face pressed into his downy chest hair, breathing him in like oxygen.

“God,” Sirius breathes into his hair, more reverence in his voice than Remus has ever heard there before. Sirius grinds down into his lap and Remus sucks in a sharp breath at the sensation, scrabbling for purchase on Sirius’s hips as he moves. Sirius is breathing roughly into his ear, ragged exhales that turn into groans when Remus finally regains enough coordination to get a hand down his pants.

“Moony—fuck, I—I wanna—”

“Tell me.”

Sirius stills above him but Remus can still feel him trembling, both of their bodies stretched taut and thrumming with need. Arms looped around Remus’s neck, Sirius licks his red-bitten lips and says, “Do you—do you wanna fuck me?”

He’s blushing, but his wide dark eyes and raspy-sweet voice are utterly guileless. Remus feels as though he’s been punched in the gut, and when his heart starts beating again after a sustained second of paralysis, it does so at a sprint.

“Yeah,” he chokes out, “I—yes.”

Sirius grins as he leans back in to kiss him, slowly at first but soon hungrily and fiercely. He gets them both out of their pyjama bottoms with uncanny efficiency and then Remus gets him flat on his back, and though their bodies are flush, the one and only thing he wants is to get closer.

“Bedside drawer,” Sirius huffs out, and Remus opens it to find, amidst a clutter of rolling papers and half-smoked joints, a small bottle of lube. He cocks an eyebrow at Sirius, who gives him a _ Who, me? _look, and Remus snorts. The questions can wait. Now, Sirius’s legs fall open at Remus’s touch; his eyelids flutter and he sighs. This, Remus thinks, this is a part of him I didn’t know. The way his every move is met with an equal and opposite reaction, the giving and taking and giving back in return. The sound Sirius makes when Remus crooks his fingers just right. The way his voice cracks when Remus eventually adds a third finger and Sirius tells him he’s ready, the words tumbling out of him in a rush, please, please, pleasepleaseplease.

He wraps his legs around Remus’s waist as Remus eases into him, slowly, slowly. His mouth falls open and his head falls back onto the pillows. When Remus is fully inside he drops his head onto Sirius’s shoulder, and for a moment they stay like that, breathing in deep lungfuls of each other.

“You okay?” Remus murmurs.

Sirius nods jerkily, his ragged nails digging into Remus’s spine.

“Good. Hold onto me.”

Sirius does, and Remus moves.

How many times has he imagined this? How many hours wasted on what amounts to shadows on the wall in comparison to the real thing? The room is lit only by the pale streetlight shining through the windows, but to Remus they might as well be basking in the full light of day. He wants to let his eyes close so powerful is the feeling, but he’s afraid of what he might miss. Sometimes the individual details come into focus like glittering jewels in a treasure chest: Sirius’s wild hair spilling out on the pillowcase like melted chocolate; the jumping blue vein visible in his throat when he lays his head back; the way he says “oh” when Remus puts his mouth there. Other times he loses focus and the details blur, coalescing like gathering clouds of pure sensation: the smell and the heat and the closeness of him. They’re the only sensations that exist, just those three things in the whole world.

“Fuck,” Sirius is mumbling, “oh, fuck.” His legs are trembling, his heels pressing into the small of Remus’s back. Then, with the gentlest of touches that nonetheless feels like a spark—whether pleasurable or painful Remus can’t quite tell—Sirius’s fingers find the huge crepuscular scar on his side, the oldest one, and Remus’s chest cracks open.

He feels alive, and present, and whole. He realises clearly that he has never in his life felt at home in his own body, either of them, until now. 

“Touch yourself,” he grits out breathlessly, and Sirius bites his lip and does as he’s told. Remus can feel his hand moving between them, can divine the path of each jolt of pleasure as it runs up Sirius’s body. They kiss with increasing sloppiness; the flowing tidal rhythm that governed their movements becomes more and more erratic. He feels as though there’s a glowing cord binding his own limbs together and it’s stretching tight, this close to snapping.

“Remus,” Sirius stutters, a half-sob, unraveling before Remus’s eyes. Then he tightens like a vice around him and comes, wet warmth spreading between them, and Remus swears into Sirius’s neck and follows.

+

He wakes just before noon in Sirius’s bed, the soft expensive sheets tangled around his legs. Rare November sunlight is streaming through the windows and Remus stretches languorously in it as the memories from last night come twirling into his brain. He feels himself grinning stupidly and he rolls over in bed to look at Sirius, just to make absolutely sure it wasn’t all a dream.

Aside from himself, though, the bed is empty, and he frowns as his mind begins racing down the worst possible track. He closes his eyes and inhales deeply through his nose—and smells bacon.

His eyes snap open. Yes, that’s surely what it is. And now that he’s fully awake and paying closer attention to his environmental stimuli, he can hear sizzling as well, and music. Specifically, side B of _ Blue_. 

He pulls on his pyjama bottoms and follows his nose and ears to the kitchen. Sirius is standing at the stove wearing a pair of boxers and nothing else, hair tied up in a messy knot, humming along to the music as he piles bacon and eggs onto a serving plate. Remus hesitates only a moment before approaching him and wrapping his arms around his waist.

“Did you steal this record from me,” he murmurs against Sirius’s skin. 

“I thought it’d make a good siren call someday, and it appears I was right.” Sirius tips his head back onto Remus’s shoulder, and Remus’s lips find his throat. “Mm. Hello, Moony.”

“Hi.”

“How’re you feeling.”

“All right. I wasn’t that drunk.”

“No, me neither.”

It feels like a confirmation of something deeper; finally, Remus thinks, finally they’re on the same page. Sirius turns around in his arms and leans up to kiss him, their movements imbued with morning slowness and warmth. Remus’s insides can’t seem to stop cartwheeling, but then again he’s not sure he wants them to.

“Sirius, the bacon.”

“Shit.”

In the end only a few pieces are burnt beyond salvation, and anyway Sirius has cooked enough to satisfy a small gang of hyenas so it’s no loss. Remus makes coffee and Sirius brings the now blooming spathiphyllum from the windowsill and puts it on the table as a centrepiece. They sit across from each other and eat with their feet tangled together, talking about nothing, laughing for no reason.

“Oh, by the way,” Sirius says, breaking the lull in conversation wherein Remus was shamelessly staring at his mouth. “Got something in the mail from James this morning.”

“What’s he say?”

“Didn’t open it.” Sirius leans back in his chair, tipping it precariously on two legs as he reaches for a rolled up piece of paper lying on the counter. “It’s addressed to both of us, so I waited.”

Remus squints at him, and Sirius blurts defensively, “Look, he asked how you were doing after the moon and I just mentioned you were staying here for a while, that’s all.”

Remus just shrugs a shoulder. “Guess he’ll have to find out soon enough.” Sirius gives him a soft sort of smile and hands the letter to him.  
  
  
_My dearest friends,_

_ You are hereby invited to the ENGAGEMENT PARTY (!!!!) being held TONIGHT chez Evans-Potter, in celebration of yes, you guessed it, the engagement (to be wed) of James Potter (myself) and Lily Evans (the spicy redhead I live with). Please BYOB as Sirius I am told it was you who almost single-handedly depleted our stockpile at your birthday party. _

_ DID I MENTION SHE SAID YES _

_ See you there, for I am, as always, _

_ Your one and only,  
_ _Prongs  
  
  
_Sirius is leaning over the table to read the letter, and when he’s finished he sits back down and chews his lip, Remus watching him apprehensively.

Finally Sirius clears his throat. “He’d better make me best man or I’ll throw a right fucking temper tantrum.”

Remus laughs, a surprised bubble of it escaping his throat. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

Sirius hums into his coffee mug, taking a long sip before setting it down decisively. “So. Do you want to be my date, then?”

He says it completely unabashedly, but Remus still catches the faint pink in his cheeks and is sure it’s there in his own face as well. “To the, to the party tonight? Or to the wedding.”

“Why, do you already have a date to the wedding?”

“No—”

“Great, then, both.”

The warmth in his face floods down to his chest. “Yeah,” he says. “Yes. To both.”

Sirius beams at him.

On the record player Joni is singing about a lover in her blood like holy wine. “_Part of you pours out of me in these lines from time to time_.” Outside it starts to rain and a firetruck flies past, wailing towards catastrophe. Remus helps Sirius clean up the kitchen and they do the dishes without magic, their elbows brushing perhaps more frequently than necessary. 

He thinks there may be nothing he can’t withstand, now that he has something to hold onto. Now, wrist-deep in suds and his mind drifting pleasantly, he isn’t thinking about the war. He is thinking about what may come after.

**Author's Note:**

> i don't actually know if inbreeding can cause polydactyly as my research into the subject was brief due to squeamishness. geneticists don't @ me!
> 
> title taken from the [talking heads song of the same name](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6T_X7MXg40). other references include talking heads' [i'm not in love](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOe8oz6ehnY), joni mitchell's [a case of you](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YuaZcylk_o), roland barthes's [_a lover's discourse: fragments_](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/204818-am-i-in-love---yes-since-i-am-waiting-the), and eliot's [the waste land](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land).
> 
> as always thank u to my gf and biggest fan [swordfishtrombones](https://archiveofourown.org/users/swordfishtrombones/) for the support and for the many suggested commas - pretty sure most of the ones that made it in are your doing!!
> 
> you can find me [here](https://newsom.tumblr.com) on tumblr if you're that way inclined. thanks 4 reading my fan fiction


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